1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the displaying of advertisements in an on-line community group media space, and more particularly, selecting on-line community groups, by advertisers, to display advertisements in the on-line community group media spaces for members of the selected (or targeted) on-line community groups.
2. Description of the Related Art
On-line advertising may be used to accomplish various business goals, ranging from building brand awareness among potential customers to facilitating on-line purchases of products and/or services. A number of different kinds of page-based or video-based online advertisements are currently in use, along with various associated distribution requirements, advertising metrics, and pricing mechanisms. Processes associated with technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) enable a page to be configured to contain a location for inclusion of an advertisement. Some Internet technologies enable rich video advertisements.
However, most on-line advertisements are not effective in reaching on-line users because the advertisers have no knowledge or only very limited knowledge regarding the receiving users. Advertisers often can only target advertisements based on a vague understanding of the demographics of users viewing certain media spaces or web pages. Therefore, most of on-line advertisement is either not targeted at all, or not targeted effectively. Since on-line advertisements are presented to the users with little or no knowledge of who the users are, the chance that certain on-line users will be interested in a specific advertisement is small. Therefore, many on-line users simply choose to ignore a majority of on-line advertisements.
It is in this context that embodiments of the present invention arise.